Laid off worker to Governor-Elect: “I believe I have made New York State a safer place”

Here’s another open letter from an anonymous upstate DMV employee who will be losing [his/her] job at the end of the year. As an investigator, this reader was tasked with catching criminals and fraudsters with multiple licenses or non-driver IDs.

Dear Governor Cuomo,

For the past 7 ½ years I have been employed as an investigator for the Department of Motor Vehicles. I was one of 40 investigators hired after 9/11 when it was determined that the 19 hijackers utilized multiple licenses to hide their real identity and attack our country and state. During the time I worked for DMV, I have arrested over 200 people and I believe I have made New York State a safer place. Many of the people I arrested possessed multiple valid NYS ID’s and committed crimes related to identity theft, every type of benefit fraud you ever imagined , voting under multiple names, credit card fraud and bank fraud. Others used the multiple identities to hide criminal records or active criminal warrants

During the past year our agency started using a new program that has helped us identify over 2,000 people in New York State who possess multiple valid licenses. Hundreds of these people have already been arrested and we have a backlog of hundreds of other individuals who are waiting to be arrested. Many of the people we have identified have used these identities to commit benefit fraud with a variety of State and Federal Agencies including collecting unemployment under several names, welfare under several names, tax fraud, collecting social security benefits under multiple names that have cost millions if not tens of millions of dollars in fraudulent benefits. Governor Patterson, our Commissioner and my bosses in Albany were happy to hold a press conference to discuss the great work they are doing and they still have the press release posted on the governor’s website.

Yesterday, I received my first formal recognition from Governor Patterson for my hard work on this project in the form of a layoff notice that that takes me off the state payroll 12/31/10. I am one of five current investigators who work at DMV who are scheduled to be laid off at the end of this month. In the past year, I arrested over 30 people in the state who committed over $500,000 in benefit fraud for a salary of less than $60,000. Now every individual I arrested who has not gone to trial yet will have the charges dismissed.

During your campaign, you talked about the importance of combating fraudulent benefit payments which seemed to be bankrupting the state. Yet in the past year DMV has cut 15 investigator positions at DMV that have not been replaced. The investigators efforts to stop customers from using fraudulent documents and facial recognition technology has helped the state reduce the huge amount of fraudulent benefits that are being paid and now I expect a reversal with this trend. It’s sad because my coworkers and I take a lot of pride in our work and we could see that we were making a difference.

I will no longer be a state employee by the time you take office but I encourage you to look into the people who are being targeted by Governor Patterson as his final act of retribution against the unionized state employees. He seems to hold us responsible for his failed election bid instead of the corrupt people he surrounded himself with. In regards to the investigator positions, maybe he is concerned about our efforts in reducing voter fraud or other types of benefits fraud. Over the past year, I was amazed at the number of “constituent letters”, my boss got from elected officials in our area who were upset that we arrested their constituents for fraud. I wish you luck over the next year and I hope you can deal with the many challenges you will face. I hope your first act is to get rid of every current political appointee, the arrogance and corruption we see when they honor the worker bees with a visit is amazing.

Note: the opinions and facts expressed in this letter are the author’s own, and not endorsed or verified by the Times Union.